The launch of the Soviet satellite Sputnik into space on Oct. 4, 1957, sent many people around the world into a tizzy.

One was Don Cromie, then owner and publisher of The Vancouver Sun. The paper went over the moon with Sputnik stories, graphics and photos.

Cromie was still not satisfied — he wanted his paper to get the world’s first photo of Sputnik in orbit. The problem was, the Vancouver weather wasn’t cooperating.

“It was cloudy and overcast [when it was launched], and we were quite happy, because there was no chance of spotting Sputnik,” recalls former Sun photographer George Diack. “Well, the next day Cromie was extremely unhappy. He said, ‘Why didn’t we charter a plane, get up in the air and get some pictures of Sputnik?’ ”

So they did.

On Oct. 8, four Sun photographers and two reporters were dispatched to the airport at night, where they chartered a Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-3 and flew 18,000 feet into the sky to try to spot the Soviet spacecraft.

As backup, Diack and Ray Allan were sent to the top of Grouse Mountain to try to photograph Sputnik from there.

The “satellite special” made a second flight at 5 a.m. Oct. 9. And when The Sun’s first edition came out that afternoon, the headline read: “Red Satellite Seen by Crew on Sun Plane.”

Pilot Bob Kerr and Sun photographer Deni Eagland both reported spotting a bright object blaze across the sky about 5:28 a.m. Unfortunately, it was gone within a few seconds, before Eagland could train his camera on it.

But when they returned to Earth and developed some film shot by Danny Scott, there was a white streak across the sky. The Sun ran it on the front page with the caption: “Is this the satellite?”

It wasn’t.

Diack says Scott had done a shot on the ground “as a backup picture in case they didn’t see anything. He opened the shutter as he walked by the plane. I don’t know if it was the wing light or not, but there was some kind of light on the plane, and he opened the shutter for a time exposure, waved the camera in front of the light, and that was the streak. The powers that be at The Sun didn’t know what it was or how it was taken. So they said, ‘It might be Sputnik, it might not be.’ ”

And the truth has never been told, until now.

The Sputnik story is just one of the epic tales from The Sun’s 100-year history.

PLAYING IT STRAIGHT

One of the best was recounted by Tom Ardies in a booklet put together by former Sun reporter Jack Lee for a reunion of 1950s Sun and Province staff.

The Sun’s then-managing editor, Hal Straight, had sent out an edict demanding shorter “ledes” (journalese for opening paragraphs) to each story. So Arnie Myers submitted a story with a one-word lede: “Dead.”

The second paragraph read: “That’s what the man found in the lane was.”

Myers’s nothin’-but-the-facts prose was a far cry from many Sun stories in the 1950s, when Ardies said the paper specialized in purple prose.

“If a boy had his hands blown off,” wrote Ardies, “a story would begin something like this. ‘He’ll never wear a wedding ring, or play catch with his kids, or know the firm handshake of a friend.’ And then it would get really colourful.”

GROUNDS FOR FIRING

The same reunion booklet includes a Rich Eustis story about how he got fired. Fresh out of the University of B.C., Eustis was working late one night when the police scanner blurted out a report of a man on a ledge.

Eustis found a drunk on a first-storey ledge being coaxed back indoors by a couple of cops. He didn’t file anything, because nothing really happened. But that was an era when newspapers wouldn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story.

“The Sun dayside [staff] picked it up, gave it a steroid injection, and by the time I came in the next day, our first edition carried a three-inch headline above a story that told how two policemen had risked their lives to save a would-be suicide on a ledge high above Pender Street, while hundreds of anxious spectators cheered at the happy outcome.

“A copy of this effort was in my mailbox. [Editor] Earl Smith had written across it: ‘I’m surprised you didn’t recognize this as top story.’

“I wrote on it, next to his note, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t recognize this as bull----,’ and sent it back. I received my pink slip by return mail.”

Eustis moved to Los Angeles and went on to become a producer for TV shows such as Head of the Class and the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour. He won an Emmy for producing a John Denver special.

THE ONE THAT GOT AWAY

A lot of Sun staff went on to star elsewhere, including Pierre Berton, Allan Fotheringham, Jack Webster, Dick Beddoes and Barry Broadfoot. Douglas Coupland once freelanced “budget gourmet” restaurant reviews for The Sun, and artist Jeff Wall did some illustrations.

One writer who didn’t get hired was Hunter S. Thompson, who applied for a job at The Sun after reading a Time magazine story about the marvellous things Jack Scott had done for the paper after he became editor in September 1958.

Thompson went on to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and was credited with the creation of gonzo journalism, but it’s tough to fault the paper for a hiring oversight given Thompson’s pitch. In the letter, which was included in a recently released collection of Thompson’s papers, he said he wanted the job even though the industry was overrun with “dullards, bums and hacks, hag-ridden with myopia, apathy and complacence.”

WELL, HE WAS A FOOTBALL GUY ...

Jack Scott was a Vancouver institution in the 1940s and ’50s. He wrote a folksy column called Our Town and journeyed across the land, doing big stories and travelogues about vacations with his family.

Apparently he didn’t see eye-to-eye with Erwin Swangard.

Swangard was a Sun editor before he went on to run the Pacific National Exhibition like his personal fiefdom.

Fed up with the bickering, publisher Cromie banished the combative Swangard to nights and named Scott editorial director.

At the time, it looked like China was about to go to war with Formosa (Taiwan). So Scott dispatched Annis Stukus to Taiwan and Elmore Philpott to China.

Eyebrows were raised, because Stukus — also known as the Loquacious Lithuanian — was a former B.C. Lions coach and football writer, not a foreign correspondent.

No matter. “Stuke” was dispatched to a local beach, where he donned an army helmet and posed peering through binoculars out to sea.

He landed in Quemoy, the island China and Taiwan were fighting over. Within a week, Stukus had scored an interview with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, “the erect, close-cropped soldier-president of the Republic of China.”

But Stukus also found time to file a story headlined “No New Normie Kwongs in Formosa.”

Normie Kwong was the star Chinese-Canadian running back for the Edmonton Eskimos.

MARIE MEETS FIDEL

The real coup of the Jack Scott era, though, came in January 1959, when Scott sent The Sun’s vivacious fashion writer, Marie Moreau, to Cuba to cover the Cuban revolution.

The cover of The Sun on Jan. 28 features a photo of a smiling Moreau running her hand up the gun barrel of a bearded Cuban revolutionary. “Marie Watches as Cubans Demand a Death for a Death” blared the headline.

A week later, Moreau hit the jackpot when she met Fidel Castro. The Feb. 5 Sun featured a front-page photo of a smiling Fidel checking out the radiant Marie. Evidently, he liked what he saw: Castro invited Marie “to go back to his revolutionary headquarters with him.”

“Castro is a handsome man, with a magnetic personality,” she wrote.

“He is tall for a Cuban, being well over six feet. His complexion, what you can see of it above his thick black beard, is a luminous olive colour. A high-bridged Grecian nose gives his face a classical look. Cubans say he looks like a saint. I think he looks what he is, a completely dedicated revolutionary leader. He is 32 and more handsome than his pictures show him.

“In case the feminine readers get an idea Castro is a cross between Stewart Granger and the sheriff of Cochise County, let me say this rebel leader is more like a Genghis Khan.

“His beard is straggly and unkempt. He wears a sweaty shirt that looks as though he hadn’t changed it since the revolution began, and his fingernails are grimy.”

Moreau’s Cuban reports earned her a Canadian Women’s Press Club prize when she got back to Canada. But there were to be no more trips to interview world leaders.

Scott went over-budget, and Cromie came back from a European holiday, fired him as editor and made him a columnist again.

A LEAGUE OF DREAMS

Replacing Scott was Swangard, a tough nut, who was probably the most detested editor in the paper’s history.

One of the writers who loathed him was Hughie Watson, who had worked with “Swanny” at The Province. At one point, Swangard banished Watson’s byline, so Watson wrote a story where the first letter in the 11 paragraphs spelled out “By Hugh Watson.”

When Swangard left The Province to became sports editor of The Sun, Watson got back at him by inventing the fictional Howe Sound Basketball League. He had a colleague phone in the scores, which The Sun ran for three months before Swangard realized it was a hoax.

jmackie@vancouversun.com

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Sputnik, Stukus and the glamorous Marie Moreau

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